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The bestselling history of and investigation into human error by beloved New Yorker writer Kathryn Schulz

“Both wise and clever, full of fun and surprise about a topic so central to our lives that we almost never even think about it.”—Bill McKibben, author of Earth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

In the tradition of The Wisdom of Crowds and Predictably Irrational, Being Wrong explores what it means to be in error, and why homo sapiens tend to tacitly assume (or loudly insist) that they are right about most everything. Kathryn Schulz argues that error is the fundamental human condition and should be celebrated as such. Guiding the reader through the history and psychology of error, from Socrates to Alan Greenspan, Being Wrong will change the way you perceive screw-ups, both of the mammoth and daily variety, forever.

Here’s a fascinating counterpoint to the notion that making a mistake somehow diminishes you as a person. We shouldn’t fear error, the author says; rather, we should embrace it because it’s our capacity for making mistakes that makes us who we are. (“To err is human” isn’t just an empty cliché.) Schulz explores the nature of error: are big mistakes fundamentally different from small mistakes, or are they all essentially the same? How much does peer pressure, or crowd response, affect our capacity to blunder? How and why do we remember relatively insignificant mistakes for the rest of our lives, long after they have ceased to be relevant to anything? And what role does “error-blindness”—our inability to know when we are in the process of making a mistake—play in our daily lives? Schulz writes in a lively style, asks lots of compelling questions, and uses plenty of examples to illustrate her points. Put this one in the same general category as Gladwell’s Blink (2005), LeGault’s Think! (2006), and Shore’s Blunder (2008): user-friendly, entertaining looks at the way our minds work. --David Pitt
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Very monotonous book that was a pain to get through. The premise of the book is strong enough for you to keep on chugging but it seems a tad opinionated and has a slight tone of arrogance. Would I suggest the book? Yes, that it is still a perspective one should pick up and develop

An excellent treatise on human fallibility. Carving a new area of "wrongology," the author very caringly and systematically describes its driving factors, our `normal' emotional reactions and responses to being wrong, and how we can realistically learn to live with and benefit from it.We all say that no one is perfect yet we all want to be right and feel triumphant all the time. The author points to the advantages gained by recognizing a place for wrongology and acting in a more realistic stance: "Thanks to error, we can revise our understanding of ourselves and amend our ideas about the world." Schulz identifies two models of error - optimistic and pessimistic - and explains why we must not take them apart but should take them together (a Leader Integrator indeed).Schulz draws analogies from diverse fields to make her various points. In the process, she also takes us through an amusing and revealing tour of literature and philosophy. Her research is thorough, bringing to light relevant claims made in various historical and philosophical discourses by the thinkers of these times (some of whom I have read about for the first time in her book).She relates particularly to the scientific method and how its approach to doubting every postulate ("the utility of error") has helped humankind revise its theories over time for enhanced utility. The journey from observations/ideation, to testable hypotheses, to measurable experiments, to confidence reproducibility, through to theorizing - and then, upon discovering changes/errors, looping back to the observations/ideation stage - is what has made science and engineering endure through this system and become the foundation for much human success.Every theory will eventually be proven wrong as we progress in this journey. This "pattern of collapse, replacement, and advancement" can be applied to any field and situation. Otherwise we are stuck with static beliefs which render even more errors. So, we - for example in corporate America - can build our strategies that realistically embrace errors and cultivate a culture for anticipating, addressing, and rewarding errors, and leveraging these for sounder business. Instead of only rewarding "new ideas", we can also reward recognizing errors. And we can develop our business leaders better by training them in the methods of candid feedback and transparency, with a corresponding shift towards "management by facts". Error no longer need be associated with evil. And, we choose to believe our own beliefs. Here is a book that every CEO and business model builder and leadership trainer must read.Though voluminous, it is well-written, helpful reading, and captivating to the end; it can be read over a weekend.

Over many years I have grappled with the related issues of error, ignorance, and uncertainty. When measured against what there is to know, what we humans do in fact know is in the order of zero-point-several zeroes. No matter how well-read, well-traveled, or well-informed we think we are, our ignorance is immense. We have to make decisions – most trivial, many of them life-changing, a few of them life-and-death – based on a trifling amount of information, the vast majority second- or third-hand. Because the amount of information we use to make everyday decisions ranges from minute to microscopic, we often make mistakes and miscalculations. We suffer misunderstandings. Unaware of so much in the universe, we get buffeted and in some cases crushed by its forces. To err is indeed human. Thus when I found a book on error in a recent Daedalus book catalog, I quickly ordered it. And I wasn’t disappointed. "Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error" by Kathryn Shulz is an amazingly insightful, humorous, and quotable book, drawing on philosophy, science, history, politics, literature, and pop culture. That I hadn’t heard of this 2010 book or seen a review in the many newspapers and magazines I read shows the ignorance in which I am immersed, despite thinking I am a well-read individual. It seems this worthwhile book somehow got lost in the shuffle among the tens of thousands of books published every year in English. Shulz, a newspaper and magazine journalist and author, looks at error in many of its forms – the personal, political, religious, philosophical – and our efforts to deny our mistakes and deflect blame. She examines the success in lessening error in the life-and-death areas of aviation and hospitals. She spends a lot of time on inductive reasoning, our way of making sense of the world, and its limitations. She looks at error in romantic love and the rare cases of radical shifts of belief that people have made. There is so much that is wise and quotable in this book that I couldn’t begin to list all the passages. Although Shulz spends many pages discussing the larger issues people can be wrong about – religion, philosophy, science, world politics – she also spends a lot of time talking about situations closer to home, including relationships. “Our default attitude toward wrongness, then – our distaste for error and our appetite for being right – tends to be rough on relationships. This applies equally to relationships among nations, communities, colleagues, friends, and (as will not be lost on most readers) relatives. Indeed, an old adage of therapists is that you can either be right or be in a relationship: you can remain attached to Team You winning every confrontation, or you can remain attached to friends and family, but good luck trying to do both. “If insisting on our rightness tends to compromise our relationships, it also reflects poorly on our grasp of probability.” We have thousands, if not tens of thousands of beliefs, ranging from the trivial (Joe’s Pizza Place closes at 9 p.m. on Fridays) to the complex and interlocking system of religious, political, and philosophical beliefs through which we experience the world. That all of these myriad beliefs are correct and reflective of the real world is exceedingly unlikely. Shulz opines that the world would be a better place if we admitted how commonplace error is, in general and in our specific cases. “As a culture, we haven’t even mastered the basic skill of saying ‘I was wrong.’ This is a startling deficiency, given the simplicity of the phrase, the ubiquity of error, and the tremendous public service that acknowledging it can provide.”

Very interesting discussion on all the ways we can be wrong...and why we are wrong so often. It is not difficult reading, but there's so much to think about that it is impossible to race through the book. Her writing is light- hearted and witty at times, there are funny moments described, and it is a very enjoyable read. I learned a lot by reading it and It has certainly influenced how I think!

This book convincingly argues why we are so afraid to be wrong and why we shouldn't actually be. It was a subject I had never given a thought to but pretty much controls most of our daily actions - what we choose to do at work, how we interact with people and what we teach and expect from our children. It was a real eye-opener. Since reading this book, I have become less afraid to make mistakes (although that probably isn't the point of the book), less judgemental of the mistakes of others and more forgiving of my own follies.